Volunteer Ministers Tent in Portland

For the last week or so, the Church of Scientology of Portland has been sponsoring a Volunteer Ministers‘ Cavalcade in Pioneer Square in Portland. They put up a huge yellow tent and spoke with anyone who wanted to talk. In one week they had about 4500 people go through the tent, looking at the exhibits, reading about solutions to drugs, illiteracy and personal problems, basically finding out about Scientology for themselves. The tent just shows the Scientology tools with which Scientologists are very familiar. (Drug Rehabilitation, Study Technology, and the Emotional Tone Scale, for example.)

Scientology sometimes gets hammered in the press and on TV by special interest groups (psychiatry, big pharma, and MDs in particular seem to think we are horning in on their territory when in fact we’re not at all interested in handling mental illness — we just don’t want the mentally ill treated like drugged cattle. The media sometimes seeks to demonize Scientologists. It’s ironic, in that even when Scientology is hammered in the media, that process still generates interest in Scientology. I guess people figure that “If the